Medicine And Metaphysics

I have oft lamented the state of medicine in the United States. I find that when it comes to moralizing, the US is #1 in the world. There is so much moral baggage wrapped up in care in this country that Hippocrates must be spinning in his grave.

What do I mean by moralizing? There is a deep thread of what people "deserve" and what is "right" as opposed to what reduces suffering. For example, pain killers. Women complain less, but receive less medication when they do complain. That means that women are receiving fewer prescriptions for more pain. Why? Because women complain. And even if they are in pain, they deserve the pain because they need to "toughen up."

It is not just women. It is everyone. Doctors are fanatical about pain killers, even when a person is in obvious pain. Why? Because they don't want to give people "hits" of fun stuff. Compare pain killers to antibiotics. There are known, significant dangers to antibiotics. They can cause massive digestive problems, are breeding scary things like MRSA, and can trigger lethal allergic reactions in a significant percentage of the population. Do you see doctors withholding antibiotics? Nope. In fact, doctors are so free with them that their overuse is one of the issues causing the quick evolution of things like MRSA. There are fewer concerns because antibiotics are not fun.

Obviously, they all will couch their reticence in terms of avoiding addiction, and this does truly have a great deal to do with it, but the rest of it is a belief that having fun with drugs is "bad," and that whatever pain the patient is feeling cannot be real. This is one of the biggest issues with male doctors and female patients. Because remember, women are not actually in pain, they're just complaining.

The root is a disconnect between our knowledge of someone else and the reality. The reality is something we cannot know. I can never be in someone's mind. Our language encourages us to feel like we can, and we have mirror neurons that help us "feel" someone else's emotions. But mirror neurons can only mirror what they sense, which is behavior. So if someone happens to be stone-faced, there is nothing to mirror, and thus we cannot feel their pain as Clinton so famously said.

I have actually heard multiple doctors tell patients in regards to pain killers or other "fun" drugs like Valium, which is non-addictive, that a certain dose works for him, and as such must obviously work for the patient. Subtly saying that if the patient says otherwise, the patient is lying. This is not specific to men, but most of the people who I've seen display this hilarious bias have been men.

In an absence of information and behavior, our own biases and emotions fill the gaps. And frequently, even if we are seeing behavior, our extant biases will affect our interpretation of that behavior. I have not experienced pain of a magnitude to require twenty oxycodone, thus that pain does not exist.

I don't mean to harp on men, but their behavior is the worst. For example, a study came out showing that men more so than any other group, if they had never experienced sexual abuse, either believed that accusers were lying or that whatever happened didn't actually cause any harm. Only the men who had experienced sexual abuse believed it to be real.

I focus on men, there, but my point applies to everyone. We allow morals and a belief that I know what you are thinking! to infect our medical treatments. I know! I know your world! I know what you deserve! Because my world and your world are the same! That means that whatever ridiculous way I view the world is the right way and applies to you!

This is a wild disconnect between reality and this metaphysical world that these blithering idiots want to believe exists. Other minds do not exist. My mind does not exist to you, and your mind does not exist to me. To base beliefs on anything but behavior, on empirical evidence, is grasping at the nether. To base medical care, where other people's well being is dependent on you, on anything but rigid empiricism, is cruel and, I would argue, borderline criminal. A doctor who believes that he or she knows what another persons' world is like can be accurately described as evil. They give primacy to their worldview over the empirically verifiable care of another person.

I'm not entirely sure why, but this moral/metaphysical thread is woven more tightly through American medicine (I am obviously ignoring third-world countries, like Islamic countries where only men can be doctors, and men cannot directly look at a woman's vagina, thus necessitating exams through a mirror). Look at the jack-off pharmacists who will not provide Plan-B pills or even correct medical advice involving possible abortion or birth control. Doctors who will not discuss condoms. They don't give two shits about the actual care of the patient. They care about maintaining their worldview's consistency by forcing it on others.

It's so easy to moralize from a high horse. That is why it's always so immensely satisfying when they fall off. I'm looking at you, drug-addicted/gay/secretly-pregnant/infidelitous Republicans!

On Personhood And Oppression

I have been only somewhat following the Personhood spat going on down in ol' Mississip. In general, I don't worry much about them seeing as they are the fattest, dumbest, most religious area in the whole of the Western World, so I come very close to seeing it as worrying about what a bunch of crazy homeless people choose to do.

What I have noticed online, though, is a large contingent of commenters who try lines similar to this:

"While I agree that a person begins at conception, I do not agree with Prop 26. I think that there are grey areas to this debate and it cannot be black & white."

Perhaps. I will give, at least for now, that the concept of "person" has some grey areas, but what people like this are oh-so-politely advocating is not just a definition, but oppression. They are arguing that women should be forced to give birth because the fertilized egg is just as good as a person. They believe this to be righteous, and for the sake of this post, it doesn't matter.

Regardless of the moral rectitude of the oppression, it is still oppression. These people, with their milquetoasty language, try to butter over the fact that they seek, or believe it is right to seek, control over a woman's body. That is black and white.

Ignoring that calling an embryo a person reduces the term "person" to uselessness, I will not abide this. You seek the oppression of certified people for the sake of potential or hypothetical people. That is stupid. And even if it wasn't stupid, do not be surprised when those same people you seek to oppress rip back control of their bodies either through illegal birth control, back-alley abortions, leaving, or all-out violence. Because, then, it doesn't matter how righteous you are.

Philosophy's Greatest Issue

BBC Horizon: Why Do We Talk?

Video Blog #1

Of Cults and Churches

I watched a documentary on NatGeo called Inside a Cult. It was about some small cult led by a guy who, of course, claimed to be the Earthly embodiment of God... or something like that. All of these cults sound the same. As per cult SOP, the leader, Michael Travesser, made a prediction that the world would end in 2007, which, according to Wikipedia, it didn't.

What I actually took away from the show wasn't anything specific to its content, but more in the eye of the director. There are multiple shots of followers gazing upon Travesser with these glassy looks of absolute devotion in their eyes. I'm working on a book about the existence of God that I hope will reach a wider and more general audience than most philosophical books, and maintained a sort of fantasy about convincing religious people of the validity of my arguments. I have since abandoned those fantasies.

This guy is wrong. I can best describe it as looking at an elephant, saying "There is an elephant," and having someone say "No. There is no elephant there." It is an immediate impasse. There is no logical path or argumentation that can be taken from that point in hopes of alleviating the disagreement. If I see an elephant, and you disagree that the elephant is there, all I can do is call you an idiot and leave.

Looking into the eyes of these cultists made me realize emotionally something that I had kinda'-sorta' realized cognitively. That there is nothing that can be said. There is nothing fundamentally different from a cultist of this ilk and your average churchgoer. The core of their belief systems are identical, the only difference is the behavior that arises from that core.

As is the problem with our inborn assumption of the existence of other minds; given imperfect information about other people we are prone to project our own internal world onto them. The vast majority of people with religious beliefs are grossly quite similar to myself. They go shopping, they eat dinner, they watch movies, they get erections at comically inconvenient times, etc. Their empirically observable behavior is so similar, I incorrectly assume a similar intellectual core. As such, my emotions tell me that arguing may be a fruitful endeavor.

This isn't the case, though. For the vast majority of believers, there is no logical argument that can be made. I know that full well with extremists of the violent ilk, like Muslims, but they're so out there that I stop seeing them as purely religious entities and instead see them as being plum crazy. These cultists were just passively religious. I could SEE it. I could see it in their eyes.

I'm still going to write my book. So what. I'll preach to the choir a bit. Now my fantasy is convincing fence sitters who, while never religious, had yet to form explicit opinions on the subject. They are the ones who kinda-sorta-maybe didn't really believe in God, and I can provide a strong logical underpinning to well-defined beliefs. That's pretty good, I think.

Is Moral Nihilism Correct?

Yes. Yes it is. While Wittgenstein never intended this to be the case, an investigation into language necessarily ends in nihilism. In fact, this direction seems so inexorable that it puzzles me why nihilism remains a dirty word.

I started thinking about this in regards to morals, and how a discussion of morals inevitably fails. It faces the same problem that David Hume tried to address when asking why metaphysical discussions always fail.

I always separate words into two classes: internal and external. All words are representative of something, but those somethings are sometimes non-empirical. They represent an internal state that is available to me only. For example, when I say "I'm angry" you don't know what that means. You only know what it means in relation to my empirically observable behavior.

You then associate that word with your own desire to act in a similar way. Thus, my world and your world acquire the same word to describe private internal states based on observation of the non-private external world.

In Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, he has a chapter on inborn moral drives. We seek out right and wrong and everyone, everywhere, seems to make similar determinations about the morality of situations. For example, I can save ten people on a trolley by diverting it to another track, but the trolley will hit a man who just happens to be on that track. That is not morally wrong. But if you present people with the situation where that same man is used to stop the trolley, like throwing him on the tracks, that is morally wrong. The end result is identical in both scenarios, but one garners a moral reaction.

But those questions relied on each person's interpretation of the word moral and how that meaning applied to the situation. I think the situation works better if we remove the word entirely and simply ask which scenario is repugnant? Which scenario gets under your skin and makes it crawl? Which scenario gives you the shivers. Morals have always had the concept of transcendence attached to them. That the determination that I am making somehow exceeds me and achieves some sort of universal rectitude.

But to describe something at all requires interaction with other people to allow a word to emerge based on shared empirical information. For example, if I suddenly start describing myself as Quizzilunked, you have no idea what that means. But if every time I used it, I shivered, smiled, farted, and then sneezed, you would only know what the word means if you also experience something that elicits the same behavior. So asking people to determine morality requires the use of internal sensations whose descriptors are determined by external data. The external data is a prerequisite to applying the word in similar ways.

This means that morals can only arise from a linguistic (social) environment, and insisting on continuing the use of the word introduces nebulousness into the discussion. The goal of any philosopher, regardless of their area of expertise, is to eliminate nebulousness and speak clearly. It is impossible to speak clearly in morals, thus turning ethics into an endeavor for fools and charlatans. The latter of which seem to all become politicians and religious leaders.

We CANNOT talk about morals. We have to talk about the other things that tie internal states with external information. If I say "I'm nauseous" and I puke every time I say that, you know that the next time you feel "off" just before barfing is likely the same feeling that I'm having. Thus, you can attach the word to your internal state while being somewhat confident that I'll attach that word to a similar internal state.

But when I say "That is morally wrong" what I'm actually describing are internal states but using an inaccurate word to do so. Most people would, today, say that burning a person at the stake, or beheading a child in public, are all morally wrong. But when we say that, we are just describing our feelings of discomfort and disgust with the image. That disgust and the corresponding word arose from our linguistic environment. There is NO TRANSCENDENT ASPECT TO THIS. If anything, pulling out the morality card has just been used as a manipulator. The word is so damned nebulous but held in such high regard that it can be used to actually cause a disgust response to something that hadn't originally caused it. For example, homosexual behavior. But remember what we're dealing with. Morality only represents an internal aversion to something (which I admit can also be internal). So when it's used in places where everyone isn't in agreement about the morality of an issue or event, it becomes a synonym for disgust.

For example, eating pie is not currently morally wrong. But let's say that a group of people move in who find pie to be a moral evil. I'm sitting with them and they begin to complain that a nearby person, who is eating pie, is morally bankrupt. Their usage of the word does not line up with my usage because our internal states when presented with this person do not match up. But if I really want these people to like me, I'll agree. Eventually, I'll fake the behavior that lines up with the statement of pie being morally wrong. Eventually, when surrounded by similarly behaving people, I will begin to feel the same internal state that triggers such behavior.

Now let's say that these people start describing really random things as morally wrong, like walking backwards, Corn-Pops, blinking both eyes at the same time, and whiskers on kittens. It is conceivable that all of this things could be habituated to trigger a disgust response ALL COMPLIMENTS OF MORALITY. There is no other word in the world that can be so flexible in manipulating people.

I frequently use the example of saying "I am horny." If someone says that to me, and always has sex afterwards, I associated "horny" with the drive for intercourse. But if they use the word wildly, saying that they're horny and eating a sandwich, sleeping, watching TV, the word association between the empirical data, the private internal state, and the word falls apart. The word becomes meaningless. But not so with morals. We can use that word to describe anything that strikes our fancy, fake it until we make it, and actually create a disgust response! The fact that a disgust response, something so primal, can be socialized I think reveals the incredible importance of society and especially language in the evolution of the human psyche.

There are no morals. None. They do. Not. Exist. All that exists are your private, internal states which you associate with words that represent the observed behavior of other people. Stop using the damned word. Stop studying ethics. If you want to do something useful, run some experiments studying the disgust response of humans to stimuli before and after reading certain phrases or hearing certain things. That is the root of morality. It's the only way to explain how, once, not all that long ago, it was entirely righteous to tie people to poles with their own intestines and watch them die.

Supercars

Definitions are critical in the world of science. For all intents and purposes, science is an arbitrary set of rules and regulation used to standardize the world for the sake of easy communication.

As such, I like defining things. It's always so easy. For example, the definition of supercar has been having a hard go, recently. With cars like the Nissan GT-R crushing cars that cost four times as much in performance figures, and the Corvette ZR1 destroying everything ever, what is a supercar anymore?

I propose a definition that can be easily and universally applied. A supercar is a car that,

• Costs in excess of six times the median annual income of a United States household.


• Has 0-60mph times and top speed times in the upper 1% of production automotive performance by model volume and not production volume.


• Is street legal with all performance numbers done on street legal tires.


• Can seat at least two people.

I chose the six-times figure because that results in allowing the Lamborghini Murcielago onto the list, which I see as the baseline supercar. It also eliminates everything Porsche, Ferrari, and Aston Martin make. Porsche is too accessible, Aston is too soft, and Ferrari uses the Enzo as their performance baseline, meaning it's their supercar, so it's mine too.

I figure the most obvious metric for a supercar is its performance. The super-rich are classified as the upper 1%, so why not classify supercars as the upper 1%.

The street legality parameter is flexible since what constitutes street legality changes from state to state, and country to country. For example, the Porsche 959 was never certified in the United States merely because the four cars required for crash testing were never supplied by Porsche. An event such as this should not have any effect on the classification of the car. I like Top Gear's measure of a car must being able to clear a speed bump.

I chose the street legal, two-seat parameter to eliminate street-ready race cars. Race cars are very fast. Of course they are. Supercars should be fast street cars, not slow race cars.

All of the measures must be compared at the time of production. So the Porsche 959 would not be a supercar now, but it certainly was when it was produced in the late 80's.

Maybe They Should Turai a Little Harder

I'm something of a car nut. I drive a hopped-up version of an ordinary Mazda 6 called the Mazdaspeed 6 (It's full name is the Mazda Mazdaspeed Mazda 6... I'm not kidding) that comes packing 270-some horsepower with a turbocharger, all-wheel-drive, and tires that cost an alarming amount of money. I read auto blogs. I fantasize about owning a Koenigsegg, like I'd know what to do with it. And I love it when the entire auto publication industry is taken in by some marketing nonsense.

If you're into Japan at all, you know the concept of Engrish. Japanese, or traditional Japanese I should say, doesn't have a few sounds that we have. One of those is our common 'L.' They have a sound that's L-ish, but not quite. So they usually end up making a sound closer to an 'R.' We all know the 'Flied Lice' joke at Chinese restaurants. So you have Japanese people saying some inadvertantly funny things, like "crap" instead of "clap," and "love" becomes, so romantic, "rabu."

So when Mazda came out with a new concept car called "Furai," my ears, after years of Japanese cartoons and movies, immediately heard "Fly." Mazda is saying it literally translates to 'Sound of Wind." This marketing line has been repeated verbatim by countless online publications. This was just too coincidental for me. And sure enough, according to Freedict.com's Japanese section, "sound of wind" actually translates to "Tenrai" and, surprise-surprise, "Furai" is "Fry" or "Fly" in Engrish.

Absolutely NO ONE has looked into this? How the hell is that possible? Anime permeates our entire culture. How the hell did they miss that Mazda was basically blowing smoke up their ass. It doesn't mean "Sound of Wind." It means "We Wanted to Use an English Word That We Can't Pronounce." It wouldn't have required much checking. Google "Furai" and the NUMBER ONE listing, still, is for fried food. Way to copy and paste from the press release, guys.

In further Japanese auto-related news, make a Japanese person's head explode by asking them to say "Lexus."

Hmmm. I Bet It Means There Are Cookies Inside!

In an interesting bit of intellecutal illumination, New Scientist magazine discusses what might happen with visual cues we have today, 10,000 years in the future.

It really got me thinking. It's not an easy thing about which to prognosticate, but imagine 10,000 years in the past. We still don't know what most cave paintings really mean. For all we know, the painting of someone's hand means there's fresh-dried dates for sale.

Effectively, the only real point of discussion is how malleable our languages are becoming. Is the incredible speed at which information spreads and people interact accelerating language evolution, or instead freezing it. We now have rigid rules of syntax and language structure.

Yes, as exemplified by the recent entry of "bling" into the Oxford English Dictionary, the vocabulary is changing at an accelerated rate, but the actual structure seems to be pretty stable. And non-verbal symbols seem to be pretty unchanging, as well. Combined with the frequent association of non-verbal symbols with language, I think the people of the future can rest easy in knowing that they will always be able to spot those pesky nuclear waste containers.

Will Our Far Descendants Understand Nuclear Warnings? (Via Science.QJ.Net)